Interview with Keen.Rong

Thank you for taking the time to do this interview with us. Firstly, we wanna ask you if you had thought that you would have performed this well when you had qualified to Hamburg?

Not really. I actually think that we performed badly compared to before we came here.

Seeing as this was your first international tournament, did you feel nervous or much the same as always?

We felt rather nervous, I guess. Like we came here and it felt like, “Wow, all these great teams and players here are really, really good.” So it made us feel really nervous.

Going into this tournament, as the captain, going up against teams like Newbee, VP, and Liquid, did you make any special preparations in terms of drafting?

Yeah, we definitely made some preparations and we banned specific heroes against certain teams. For example, against Liquid, we banned Wisp and Chen because we were really afraid of playing against the Wisp and we’re not very good at dealing with Chen. For some other teams we basically just banned the two heroes that we didn’t really wanna see.

Those of us in the West felt that you played superbly yesterday, did you feel the same sort of, perhaps, excitement and adrenaline? For example when you were playing Spirit Breaker and you bashed Doom in the early game and killed him while he was teleported, how were you feeling?

I felt like I had really good luck. *laughs*

We’d also like to ask about how you guys felt when you played against LGD in the Bo5 Finals of the Chinese Qualifiers.

We lost to LGD at the Chinese Qualifiers for TI and they went on to perform quite well so we felt afraid at first, thinking that we would lose again. However, after the first game, we felt like LGD weren’t that strong after all. After that we basically all felt like we had a really good fighting spirit and then we won.

Since this is your first international tournament, coming out here to Hamburg, did you go around and maybe experience and enjoy new kinds of food?

Not really, I felt like we really weren’t used to the kind of food here.

For our next question, Valve announced that they would release a new patch after Hamburg. Is there anything that you want or are looking forward to in this patch?

Not really, I personally think that, as a professional player, we should always be able to adapt to the patch. That said, with the new patch coming, we can probably just go back home already. *laughs*

So there aren’t any heroes or things that you don’t really like? For example, some of the other players have said that they’d like to see Earthshaker and KOTL nerfed.

Not really. I think that, as a game, it’s nice when we can pretty much play any hero and that’s enough.

Alright, thank you very much for the interview. We hope that you guys will continue to perform well and qualify to other international tournaments; we really enjoyed watching you play.